The Marquis of Lossie Part 52

More than even the sight of his face beaming with pleasure, more than that grasp of the hand that would have squeezed the life out of a polecat, was the sound of the mother tongue from his lips. The cloud of Peter's long distrust broke and vanished, and the sky of his soul was straightway a celestial blue. He s.n.a.t.c.hed his hand from Malcolm's, walked back into the empty house, ran into the little closet off the kitchen, bolted the door, fell on his knees in the void little sanctuary that had of late been the scene of so many foiled attempts to lift up his heart, and poured out speechless thanksgiving to the G.o.d of all grace and consolation, who had given him back his friend, and that in the time of his sore need.

So true was his heart in its love, that, giving thanks for his friend, he forgot that friend was the Marquis of Lossie, before whom his enemy was but as a snail in the sun.

When he rose from his knees, and went out again, his face shining and his eyes misty, his wife was on the top of the cart, tying a rope across the cradle.

"Peter," said Malcolm, "ye was quite richt to gang, but I'm glaid they didna lat ye."

"I wad ha'e been half w'y to Port Gordon or noo," said Peter.

"But noo ye'll no gang to Port Gordon," said Malcolm. "Ye'll jist gang to the Salmon for a feow days, till we see hoo things gang."

"I'll du onything ye like, Ma'colm," said Peter, and went into the house to fetch his bonnet.

In the street arose the cry of a woman, and into the close rushed one of the fisherwives, followed by the factor. He had found a place on the eastern side of the village, where, jumping a low earth wail, he got into a little back yard, and was trampling over its few stocks of kail, and its one dusty miller and double daisy, when the woman to whose cottage it belonged caught sight of him through the window, and running out fell to abusing him in no measured language. He rode at her in his rage, and she fled shrieking into Peter's close, where she took refuge behind the cart, never ceasing her vituperation, but calling him every choice name in her vocabulary. Beside himself with the rage of murdered dignity, he rode up, and struck at her over the corner of the cart, whereupon, from the top of it, Annie Mair ventured to expostulate.

"Hoot, sir! It's no mainners to lat at a wuman like that."

He turned upon her, and gave her a cut on the arm and hand, so stinging that she cried out, and nearly fell from the cart. Out rushed Peter and flew at the factor, who from his seat of vantage began to ply his whip about his head. But Malcolm, who, when the factor appeared, had moved aside to keep Kelpie out of mischief, and saw only the second of the two a.s.saults, came forward with a scramble and a bound.

"Haud awa, Peter," he cried. "This belangs to me. I ga'e him back 's whup, an' sae I'm acc.o.o.ntable.--Mr Crathie,"--and as he spoke he edged his mare up to the panting factor, "the man who strikes a woman must be taught that he is a scoundrel, and that office I take. I would do the same if you were the lord of Lossie instead of his factor."

Mr Crathie, knowing himself now in the wrong, was a little frightened at the set speech, and began to bl.u.s.ter and stammer, but the swift descent of Malcolm's heavy riding whip on his shoulders and back made him voluble in curses. Then began a battle that could not last long with such odds on the side of justice. It was gazed at from the mouth of the close by many spectators, but none dared enter because of the capering and plunging and kicking of the horses. In less than a minute the factor turned to flee, and spurring out of the court, galloped up the street at full stretch.

"Haud oot o' the gait," cried Malcolm, and rode after him. But more careful of the people, he did not get a good start, and the factor was over the trench and into the fields before he caught him up. Then again the stinging switch buckled about the shoulders of the oppressor, driven with all the force of Malcolm's brawny arm.

The factor yelled and cursed and swore, and still Malcolm plied the whip, and still the horses flew--over fields and fences and ditches. At length in the last field, from which they must turn into the high road, the factor groaned out--"For G.o.d's sake, Ma'colm, ha'e mercy!"

The youth's uplifted arm fell by his side. He turned his mare's head, and when the factor turned his, he saw the avenger already halfway back to Scaurnose, and the constables in full flight meeting him.

While Malcolm was thus occupied, his sister was writing to Lady Bellair. She told her that, having gone out for a sail in her yacht, which she had sent for from Scotland, the desire to see her home had overpowered her to such a degree that of the intended sail she had made a voyage, and here she was, longing just as much now to see Lady Bellair; and if she thought proper to bring a gentleman to take care of her, he also should be welcomed for her sake. It was a long way for her to come, she said, and Lady Bellair knew what sort of a place it was; but there was n.o.body in London now, and if she had nothing more enticing on her tablets, &c., &c. She ended with begging her, if she was mercifully inclined to make her happy with her presence, to bring to her Caley and her hound Demon.

She had hardly finished when Malcolm presented himself.

She received him very coldly, and declined to listen to anything about the fishers. She insisted that, being one of their party, he was prejudiced in their favour; and that of course a man of Mr Crathie's experience must know better than he what ought to be done with such people, in view of protecting her rights, and keeping them in order. She declared that she was not going to disturb the old way of things to please him; and said that he had now done her all the mischief he could, except, indeed, he were to head the fishers and sack Lossie House.

Malcolm found that, by making himself known to her as her brother, he had but given her confidence in speaking her mind to him, and set her free from considerations of personal dignity when she desired to humiliate him. But he was a good deal surprised at the ability with which she set forth and defended her own view of her affairs, for she did not tell him that the Rev. Mr Cairns had been with her all the morning, flattering her vanity, worshipping her power, and generally instructing her in her own greatness--also putting in a word or two anent his friend Mr Crathie and his troubles with her ladyship's fisher tenants. She was still, however, so far afraid of her brother--which state of feeling was, perhaps, the main cause of her insulting behaviour to him--that she sat in some dread lest he might chance to see the address of the letter she had been writing.

I may mention here that Lady Bellair accepted the invitation with pleasure for herself and Liftore, promised to bring Caley, but utterly declined to take charge of Demon, or allow him to be of the party. Thereupon Florimel, who was fond of the animal, and feared much, as he was no favourite, that something would happen to him, wrote to Clementina, praying her to visit her in her lovely loneliness --good as The Gloom in its way, though not quite so dark--and to add a hair to the weight of her obligations if she complied, by allowing her deerhound to accompany her. Clementina was the only one, she said, of her friends for whom the animal had ever shown a preference.

Malcolm retired from his sister's presence much depressed, saw Mrs Courthope, who was kind as ever, and betook himself to his own room, next to that in which his strange history began. There he sat down and wrote urgently to Lenorme, stating that he had an important communication to make, and begging him to start for the north the moment he received the letter. A messenger from Duff Harbour well mounted, he said, would ensure his presence within a couple of hours.

He found the behaviour of his old acquaintances and friends in the Seaton much what he had expected: the few were as cordial as ever, while the many still resented, with a mingling of the jealousy of affection, his forsaking of the old life for a calling they regarded as unworthy of one bred at least if not born a fisherman. A few there were besides who always had been, for reasons perhaps best known to themselves, less than friendly. The women were all cordial.

"Sic a mad-like thing," said old Futtocks, who was now the leader of the a.s.sembly at the barn, "to gang scoorin' the cuintry on that mad brute o' a mere! What guid, think ye, can come sic like?"

"H'ard ye him ever tell the story aboot Colonsay Castel yon'er?"

"Ay hey!"

"Weel, isna his mere 'at they ca' Kelpie jist the pictur' o' the deil's ain horse 'at lay at the door an' watched, whan he flaw oot an' tuik the wa' wi' 'im ?"

"I cudna say till I saw whether the deil himsel' cud gar her lie still."

CHAPTER LIX: THE PEACEMAKER

The heroes of Scaurnose expected a renewal of the attack, and in greater force, the next day, and made their preparations accordingly, strengthening every weak point around the village. They were put in great heart by Malcolm's espousal of their cause, as they considered his punishment of the factor; but most of them set it down in their wisdom as resulting from the popular condemnation of his previous supineness. It did not therefore add greatly to his influence with them. When he would have prevailed upon them to allow Blue Peter to depart, arguing that they had less right to prevent than the factor had to compel him, they once more turned upon him: what right had he to dictate to them? he did not belong to Scaurnose!

He reasoned with them that the factor, although he had not justice, had law on his side, and could turn out whom he pleased. They said--"Let him try it!" He told them that they had given great provocation, for he knew that the men they had a.s.saulted came surveying for a harbour, and that they ought at least to make some apology for having maltreated them. It was all useless: that was the women's doing, they said; besides they did not believe him; and if what he said was true, what was the thing to them, seeing they were all under notice to leave?

Malcolm said that perhaps an apology would be accepted. They told him, if he did not take himself off, they would serve him as he had served the factor. Finding expostulation a failure, therefore, he begged Joseph and Annie to settle themselves again as comfortably as they could, and left them.

Contrary to the expectation of all, however, and considerably to the disappointment of the party of Dubs, Fite Folp, and the rest, the next day was as peaceful as if Scaurnose had been a halcyon nest floating on the summer waves; and it was soon reported that, in consequence of the punishment he had received from Malcolm, the factor was far too ill to be troublesome to any but his wife. This was true, but, severe as his chastis.e.m.e.nt was, it was not severe enough to have had any such consequences but for his late growing habit of drinking whisky. As it was, fever had followed upon the combination of bodily and mental suffering. But already it had wrought this good in him, that he was far more keenly aware of the brutality of the offence of which he had been guilty than he would otherwise have been all his life through. To his wife, who first learned the reason of Malcolm's treatment of him from his delirious talk in the night, it did not, circ.u.mstances considered, appear an enormity, and her indignation with the avenger of it, whom she had all but hated before, was furious.

Malcolm, on his part, was greatly concerned to hear the result of his severity. He refrained, however, from calling to inquire, knowing it would be interpreted as an insult, not accepted as a sign of sympathy. He went to the doctor instead--who, to his consternation, looked very serious at first. But when he learned all about the affair, he changed his view considerably, and condescended to give good hopes of his coming through, even adding that it would lengthen his life by twenty years if it broke him of his habits of whisky drinking and rage.

And now Malcolm had a little time of leisure, which he put to the best possible use in strengthening his relations with the fishers.

For he had nothing to do about the House, except look after Kelpie; and Florimel, as if determined to make him feel that he was less to her than before, much as she used to enjoy seeing him sit his mare, never took him out with her--always Stoat. He resolved therefore, seeing he must yet delay action a while in the hope of the appearance of Lenorme, to go out as in the old days after the herring, both for the sake of splicing, if possible, what strands had been broken between him and the fishers, and of renewing for himself the delights of elemental conflict.

With these views, he hired himself to the Partan, whose boat's crew was short handed. And now, night after night, he revelled in the old pleasure, enhanced by so many months of deprivation. Joy itself seemed embodied in the wind blowing on him out of the misty infinite while his boat rocked and swung on the waters, hanging between two worlds, that in which the wind blew, and that other dark swaying mystery whereinto the nets to which it was tied went away down and down, gathering the harvest of the ocean.

It was as if nature called up all her motherhood to greet and embrace her long absent son. When it came on to blow hard, as it did once and again during those summer nights, instead of making him feel small and weak in the midst of the storming forces, it gave him a glorious sense of power and unconquerable life. And when his watch was out, and the boat lay quiet, like a horse tethered and asleep in his clover field, he too would fall asleep with a sense of simultaneously deepening and vanishing delight such as be had not at all in other conditions experienced.

Ever since the poison had got into his system, and crept where it yet lay lurking in hidden corners and crannies, a noise at night would on sh.o.r.e startle him awake, and set his heart beating hard; but no loudest sea noise ever woke him; the stronger the wind flapped its wings around him, the deeper he slept. When a comrade called him by name, he was up at once and wide awake.

It answered also all his hopes in regard to his companions and the fisher folk generally. Those who had really known him found the same old Malcolm, and those who had doubted him soon began to see that at least he had lost nothing in courage or skill or goodwill: ere long he was even a greater favourite than before. On his part, he learned to understand far better the nature of his people, as well as the individual characters of them, for his long (but not too long) absence and return enabled him to regard them with unaccustomed, and therefore in some respects more discriminating eyes.

Duncan's former dwelling happening to be then occupied by a lonely woman, Malcolm made arrangements with her to take them both in; so that in relation to his grandfather too something very much like the old life returned for a time--with this difference, that Duncan soon began to check himself as often as the name of his hate, with its accompanying curse, rose to his lips.

The factor continued very ill. He had sunk into a low, state, in which his former indulgence was greatly against him. Every night the fever returned, and at length his wife was worn out with watching, and waiting upon him.

And every morning Lizzy Findlay, without fail, called to inquire how Mr Crathie had spent the night. To the last, while quarrelling with every one of her neighbours with whom he had anything to do, he had continued kind to her, and she was more grateful than one in other trouble than hers could have understood. But she did not know that an element in the origination of his kindness was the belief that it was by Malcolm she had been wronged and forsaken.

Again and again she had offered, in the humblest manner, to ease his wife's burden by sitting with him at night; and at last, finding she could hold up no longer, Mrs Crathie consented. But even after a week she found herself still unable to resume the watching, and so, night after night, resting at home during a part of the day, Lizzy sat by the sleeping factor, and when he woke ministered to him like a daughter. Nor did even her mother object, for sickness is a wondrous reconciler.

Little did the factor suspect, however, that it was partly for Malcolm's sake she nursed him, anxious to shield the youth from any possible consequences of his righteous vengeance.

While their persecutor lay thus, gradually everything at Scaurnose, and consequently at the Seaton, lapsed into its old way, and the summer of such content as before they had possessed, returned to the fishers. I fear it would have proved hard for some of them, had they made effort in that direction, to join in the prayer, if prayer it may be called, put up in church for him every Sunday. What a fearful canopy the prayers that do not get beyond the atmosphere would make if they turned brown with age! Having so lately seen the factor going about like a maniac, raving at this piece of damage and that heap of dirt, the few fishers present could never help smiling when Mr Cairns prayed for him as "the servant of G.o.d and his church now lying grievously afflicted--persecuted, but not forsaken, cast down, but not destroyed;"--having found the fitting phrases he seldom varied them.

Through her sorrow, Lizzy had grown tender, as through her shame she had grown wise. That the factor had been much in the wrong only rendered her anxious sympathy the more eager to serve him. Knowing so well what it was to have done wrong, she was pitiful over him, and her ministrations were none the less devoted that she knew exactly how Malcolm thought and felt about him; for the affair, having taken place in open village and wide field and in the light of midday, and having been reported by eyewitnesses many, was everywhere perfectly known, and Malcolm therefore talked of it freely to his friends, amongst them both to Lizzy and her mother.

Sickness sometimes works marvellous changes, and the most marvellous on persons who to the ordinary observer seem the least liable to change. Much apparent steadfastness of nature, however, is but sluggishness, and comes from incapacity to generate change or contribute towards personal growth; and it follows that those whose nature is such can as little prevent or r.e.t.a.r.d any change that has its initiative beyond them. The men who impress the world as the mightiest are those often who can the least--never those who can the most in their natural kingdom; generally those whose frontiers lie openest to the inroads of temptation, whose atmosphere is most subject to moody changes and pa.s.sionate convulsions, who, while perhaps they can whisper laws to a hemisphere, can utter no decree of smallest potency as to how things shall be within themselves.

Place Alexander ille Magnus beside Malcolm's friend Epictetus, ille servorum servus; take his crutch from the slave and set the hero upon his Bucephalus--but set them alone and in a desert: which will prove the great man? which the unchangeable? The question being what the man himself shall or shall not be, shall or shall not feel, shall or shall not recognize as of himself and troubling the motions of his being, Alexander will prove a mere earth bubble, Epictetus a cavern in which pulses the tide of the eternal and infinite Sea.

But then first, when the false strength of the self imagined great man is gone, when the want or the sickness has weakened the self a.s.sertion which is so often mistaken for strength of individuality, when the occupations in which he formerly found a comfortable consciousness of being have lost their interest, his ambitions their glow, and his consolations their colour, when suffering has wasted away those upper strata of his fact.i.tious consciousness, and laid bare the lower, simpler, truer deeps, of which he has never known or has forgotten the existence, then there is a hope of his commencing a new and real life.

Powers then, even powers within himself of which he knew nothing, begin to a.s.sert themselves, and the man commonly reported to possess a strong will, is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed. This factor, this man of business, this despiser of humbug, to whom the scruples of a sensitive conscience were a contempt, would now lie awake in the night and weep.

"Ah!" I hear it answered, "but that was the weakness caused by his illness." True: but what then had become of his strength? And was it all weakness? What if this weakness was itself a sign of returning life, not of advancing death--of the dawn of a new and genuine strength! For he wept because, in the visions of his troubled brain, he saw once more the cottage of his father the shepherd, with all its store of lovely nothings round which the nimbus of sanct.i.ty had gathered while he thought not of them; wept over the memory of that moment of delight when his mother kissed him for parting with his willow whistle to the sister who cried for it: he cried now in his turn, after five and fifty years, for not yet had the little fact done with him, not yet had the kiss of his mother lost its power on the man: wept over the sale of the pet lamb, though he had himself sold thousands of lambs, since; wept over even that bush of dusty miller by the door, like the one he trampled under his horse's feet in the little yard at Scaurnose that horrible day.